The U.S. Treasury Department has taken action against a company in the Philippines called Funnull Technology and its boss, Liu Lizhi, because they have been helping cryptocurrency scams. On May 29, 2025, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said Funnull is connected to many scam websites that the FBI knows about, and these scams have cost people over $200 million.
The company implements its scams by buying many IP addresses from big tech companies and then selling them to criminals. The scammers use these addresses to create fake websites that look like real investment platforms. The US Treasury Department has stated that the company does it in such a manner that people get tricked into its scams by thinking they are investing their cryptocurrency on a legitimate site, and as they invest their money, the scammers steal it.
As a part of its scam, in the year 2024, the company had changed some coding tools that web developers use by modifying the code so that when people visited real websites, they were privately sent to fake scam websites or online gambling pages. This trick helps scammers hide by letting them quickly change their website addresses and internet locations, making it difficult for authorities to catch them and shut down their sites.
As per the reports, Liu Lizhi, a Chinese person who ran Funnull, is also punished by the U.S. OFAC placed him on a special list known as the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) list. Being on this list means any money or property he has in the U.S. is frozen, and Americans are not allowed to do business or send money to him or Funnull.
If they do, they could get in trouble. OFAC also went after two cryptocurrency wallets linked to Funnull. Blockchain research firm Chainalysis said these wallets were probably used to collect money from scammers. Chainalysis also found that Funnull is a big part of a network called “Triad Nexus,” which includes over 200,000 fake website names tied to scams, like pretend trading apps that trick people into losing money.
This initiative is part of a bigger effort to stop cybercriminals by breaking up the systems they use to run crypto scams. The goal is to make it harder for scammers to operate and to keep people from losing a lot of money by implementing such fraud.
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